The Public’s Foreign Aid Priorities: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

Abstract

Foreign aid is one of the few areas where Americans say the government should spend less. We leverage a unique conjoint experiment to assess how characteristics of an aid package, as well as characteristics of the targeted country, affect public support. We find that people are far more inclined to support economic aid than military aid and are disinclined to provide aid to undemocratic countries. We also find that people are more averse to providing aid—particularly economic aid—to countries in the “greater Middle East” than those countries’ other characteristics would suggest. These effects are comparable to those associated with substantial increases in the cost of the aid package, suggesting that public wariness of foreign aid is not rooted in a fundamental aversion to spending in this domain. Our findings offer new insights into the contours of public opinion regarding foreign aid.

What Can Conjoint Experiments Tell Us about Americans’ Abortion Attitudes?

“…Consistent with evidence that the effects of questions wording on reported abortion attitudes can vary across subgroups (e.g., Singer & Couper, 2014), this narrowing of the partisan gap is tied to differences in how Democrats and Republicans respond to the “reason” and gestational age treatments. This said, in line with recent work that finds substantial consensus in terms of how partisans respond to particular features of policy proposals (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; Doherty et al, 2020; Coppock, 2021) these are differences in effect magnitudes, rather than differences in which considerations “matter” to respondents.…”

Signaling Democratic Progress through Electoral System Reform in Post-Communist States

“…While foreign aid is partly determined by geopolitical factors, citizens from donor countries have strong preferences about foreign aid flows that influence actual aid allocation. Citizens tend to disapprove of foreign aid allocations to countries perceived as non-democratic (Doherty et al, 2020), specifically including countries who experience substantial electoral fraud (Heinrich and Kobayashi, 2020). Further, even absent citizen pressure, donor agencies are less likely to provide foreign aid to countries with high levels of electoral fraud (Swedlund, 2017).…”

Using Conjoint Experiments to Study Preferences in Multidimensional Choice Contexts

“…Given these advantages, the conjoint experiments are widely applied in political science to capture multidimensional preferences toward, for instance, political candidates (e.g., Graham & Svolik, 2020), immigrants (e.g., Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015), and institutional reforms (e.g., van der Does & Kantorowicz, 2021). Likewise, they are very popular in studying public preferences toward public policy changes such as social policies (e.g., Gallego & Marx, 2016), climate policies (e.g., Bechtel et al, 2017, Beiser-McGrath & Bernauer, 2019, economic policies (e.g., Bansak et al, 2021), foreign policies (e.g., Doherty et al, 2020), and counter-terrorism strategies (e.g., Kantorowicz-Reznichenko et al, 2021).…”